


respiration

by catharsis_in_a_bottle



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, POV Remus Lupin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:13:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26807155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catharsis_in_a_bottle/pseuds/catharsis_in_a_bottle
Summary: With death came a second life.
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore & Remus Lupin, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Remus Lupin & James Potter, Remus Lupin & Lily Evans Potter, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	respiration

I had always imagined what it would feel like to die.

Because I knew it would happen. My fall was inevitable from the moment the werewolf’s teeth touched my skin. I was alive then, a shaking toddler with an affliction that meant the demise of a normal life. I was alive. It would not have been the werewolf that killed me, no.

It would have been the others. The parents who shrieked at my proximity to their children, the playmates who shrunk away from me once they knew, afraid that I meant to harm them. (I never did.) It would have been the strangers who abhorred my very existence. It would have been the employers who took notice of my regular monthly sick leave. They would have set my death in motion, and I, my hand unstayed, would have swept the scythe myself as the culminating act of my horrible being. Needless to say, this never happened. But I imagined it. I imagined the day when every bit of hatred, every scrap of vendetta, every morsel of despise, would infect my already infected form and bring me to an end.

I was saved. By James. By Lily. By Dumbledore.

By Sirius.

And as each one fell, I came to realize that love spoke beyond death. Love, the most dangerous and wonderful of chemical reactions, remained until there was no one left to feel it. My hand was stayed.

My final culmination came in the form of Antonin Dolohov. I fell under the crumbling roof of one of the few places I had ever called home, the castle that had brought me the greatest gift of friendship, and of love. I looked into the eyes of Tonks, my dearest living friend, as the Killing Curse hit my chest, as another one hit hers. My vision went foggy and then black. The screams around me became muffled. I could feel my heart stop. I was in darkness.

I was not surprised. Because this - this was what I had always imagined.  
  


* * *

  
  
I awoke in a space that was not a room. It wasn’t outside, either. It was eternally white, a pearlescent floor stretching infinitely in all directions with no walls or ceiling in sight. I was on my back with my head tilted to the side, warmth seeping into my coat from the floor below me. With some difficulty and heaviness of limbs, I drew myself to my feet.

I must confess that I had always been rather skeptical of the prospect of an afterlife; so I was now. Fleetingly I thought I must be dreaming, but then I remembered drowning in the suffocating feeling of death, and I knew that no living man could remember such a thing. I placed a hand to my neck. I felt a heartbeat. In fact, I felt distinctly of life. But this glowing white abyss was too hollow to be of earth.

I held my hands out before me. They seemed younger, less calloused. They still bore scars. I looked down at my robes and was pleased - or at least contented - to find myself in my familiar, though rather run-down, getup. At the very least I felt like myself in shabby robes with an unnecessary amount of hidden pockets. 

In my self-examination, something extraordinary happened. The white expanse before me began to shift and stretch, folding upwards so that suddenly there _were_ walls, a ceiling, the mold of a sitting room - and then the sitting room filled with color, red and yellow and brown blooming across the pale surfaces like so many bouquets of flowers so that I found myself in a space reminiscent of… of James and Lily’s old sitting room. I forgot to breathe. 

There was the hearth, flames dancing behind the iron grate and filling the room with warm orange light. There was the bookshelf, which I remembered with a shiver holding books for baby Harry; now it held spellbooks and nameless leather-bound volumes. There was the rug (Harry crawling across it) and the painting of the Gryffindor lion (James hanging it crookedly and Lily straightening it) and the armchairs that always held them… and before my eyes, they appeared. James in the red armchair, staring into the fire, black hair lying messily atop his head. Lily in the faded leather armchair, red hair cascading over her shoulders, turning those painfully familiar eyes on me and letting out a choked gasp -

“R-Remus?”

I remained unable to breathe. Perhaps I didn’t need to. James turned to look at me, and I could not read his expression. I looked between them, hardly daring to believe that this was more than a dream - and then in my shock they both rushed towards me, wrapping me in a hug so fierce that I might have melted on the spot. They pulled back and regarded me with wide eyes.

“Remus,” James whispered. “Remus, was it… was it Voldemort?”

I nodded my heavy head. “A Death Eater by the name of Dolohov,” I said, failing to quell the tremble in my fingers. 

They were so young. Both of them. When they died… they were only twenty one. James had no forehead wrinkles. Lily had no lines around her eyes. They were so _young_. But looking at myself, and feeling the way I felt - a distinct difference, the presence of energy - I thought that I might be young too. Younger than I had been.

Lily took my wrist in her hand and looked right at me, right into me. 

“We were watching the battle,” she said slowly, tracing her fingers over my coat sleeve. “We’ve been watching everyone… all these years… but we couldn’t tonight. We saw - we saw H-Harry…”

James buried his face in his hands and inhaled deeply. I turned my gaze to him. 

“I saw Harry,” he muttered hoarsely, emerging from his palms. His eyes glistened behind his glasses. “Just for a moment, I saw him here. But he isn’t dead.” 

Lily was still clinging to my sleeve. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, he isn’t dead.” I did not know how I knew this, but nevertheless it was a fact that took root in my head and stayed there.

James turned and collapsed into his armchair; Lily finally let go of me and did the same, her hair falling gracefully around her shoulders again. Wordlessly, she took James’s hand across from her. I stepped carefully and took my place on the sofa, where so many years ago I had sat in cheerful conversation, joking with James, and _Peter_ (whom I could hardly bear to think about anymore) and…

“Sirius,” I muttered, and James looked up, the fire flickering over his tired face. “Is he here?”

James tilted his head. “Sometimes,” he replied slowly. “But other times he sort of… disappears. I’m still not sure how all of _this_ \- ” here he gestured lazily to the room surrounding us “ - works.”

“Where is he?” I breathed. For the first time, I could feel my lungs. I knew what it felt like to breathe. Hope tugged me to my feet. Lily looked rather startled.

She said, “Well… sometimes we find him out there…” She pointed to the door that I remembered leading to the stairs. “But it’s a bit weird - Remus!” she shouted after me, for I had already dashed towards the door. I threw it open, toppled forward, and found myself falling so fast that I didn’t have time to register what had happened. 

This was not the hallway that led to the stairs - this was another abyss of whiteness, only this time there was no floor, only a gaping maw below waiting to swallow me. My coat billowed up over my head, but it was a strange feeling - for I knew that I was falling very quickly, and yet I had no reference point to which I could compare my speed. The walls were millions of miles away, blank and white, and so was the floor. I could not think. My eyes watered horribly.

Then, suddenly as it started, it stopped. I found myself thrown into the same sofa I had been sitting in only moments before, surrounded again by the sitting room; this time, however, James and Lily were totally absent. Shakily, I looked into the fire, which crackled calmly and almost serenely. Behind me, I heard a door click shut softly, followed by the soft padding of footsteps.

“Remus,” said a voice. This time, it was not a question. I turned in my seat, hardly daring to believe it. But there he was. He looked younger too, like he had before Azkaban. His expression was soft; his eyes reflected the dancing fire as he looked at me, his mouth hanging slightly open, his eyebrows drawn together.

“Sirius,” said I. In that moment, nothing moved. We were locked together in time. It had been over two years since I had last looked him in the face.

And then he came and sat down next to me. He sank into the sofa slowly, as if into a cloud, and leaned wordlessly against my side, his head on my shoulder. We were not alive, but his warmth felt more real than anything I had ever felt before. I slipped my arm up his back and into his hair. It was so quiet. Too quiet. Perfectly quiet. 

At long last, he buried his face against my coat and murmured something indistinct. I prodded him to show that I hadn’t understood. 

“Do you have any chocolate?” he repeated, raising his eyes hopefully up at me. For the first time, I smiled. 

“I don’t think so,” I told him, and he looked convincingly crestfallen. Then he became more quiet, and his expression was genuine.

“There isn’t anything to eat here,” he said, looking down. “We don’t need it, I suppose.”

“No. I suppose we don’t.” I shifted slightly in my seat, pulling Sirius’s head back into my shoulder; he let out a soft hum of appreciation. We were both staring into the fire, but I think we saw the same sort of melancholy etched into everything. We felt each other and how much we had been missed. We saw James’s and Lily’s sitting room and couldn’t help remembering the days before Voldemort. We were both thinking of our days in Grimmauld place when the Order had just re-formed, when I stayed with him as he fell further and further into a spiraling chasm of an open wound: the feelings of uselessness, of desire, of longing for untouchable freedom. These were feelings I knew all too well, and so now we shared them in our memories. 

At last, he broke the spell. “I feel horrible, Moony.” I had such a strong and inexplicable surge of emotion at the nickname that I nearly had to choke back a sob.

I asked him why he felt so.

“Because,” he whispered, and now he turned to me in fear, “I sort of wished… just fleetingly, but it was there… that you would… thatyouwoulddiesothatIcouldseeyou,” came the confession in a rush of air. 

Far from being angry with him, I smiled and cupped Sirius’s cheek in my hand.

“I don’t blame you, Padfoot,” I disclosed to him. “Every day I wished that you would come back to life so that I might see you. I don’t see much difference.”

The reverence upon his face cut me in half. I found myself sobbing into his shoulder. I was not sad. I was not happy. I was simply alive with emotion in a place that defied the very existence of life.  
  


* * *

  
  
My time here was strange, yet in a certain sense predictable. The vast majority of the time I found myself with Sirius. I would fall through the void of whiteness and find myself strewn about the world with him - in the sitting room, in a cafe, in a forest, by a lake, in a city. There was no order to it, but there was a rhythm.

Other times, him and I would join James and Lily. We appeared in libraries, on hiking paths, and once off the Hogwarts grounds… there were always blurry shapes moving around us, living people in the real world. If I found inside myself a burning desire to watch over someone - Harry, most often - I would be whisked away through the cavernous white ‘room’ to wherever my person of choice happened to be. A certain logic arose from the madness of it all.

However, the fact remained, despite my newfound happiness, that I found deep sadness in death, simply because I had left behind the world I had finally learned to love.

One day, to my great surprise, I found myself facing not Sirius or James or Lily, but Albus Dumbledore.

At first I did not recognize him. He was young. In fact, he might have been my age. His hair was dark with just a hint of red, cut short along with a trim beard. His face was unwrinkled and his eyes were fresh, for lack of a better word. He wore a grey three-piece instead of the usual decadent robes. The only comparable part of him was his serene expression. The whole sight was so out of place in my mind that I could do nothing but gape at him for a full minute.

We were not in a room or in any recognizable place; we were simply surrounded by the vast whiteness that I had grown so accustomed to. Dumbledore peered at me in a sort of joyful curiosity before speaking, and henceforth rid me of my temporary paralysis.

“Remus,” he said softly. His voice was different, clearer. “I would say something along the lines of ‘how wonderful to see you,’ but given the circumstances… I feel it would be rather inappropriate.”

I swallowed, nodded, and smiled. “Yes, well,” I replied. “I haven’t put too much stock in the circumstances lately.”

He nodded back at me. “Better to pretend we are alive?”

I tilted my head. I didn’t know how to respond. But as it had always been with Dumbledore, his questions could be passed off as rhetorical. He smiled again and it felt familiar. 

He spoke again, this time more quietly. “I don’t think we have to pretend,” he said. “I think what it means to be alive… has less dependence on respiration than we may believe.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that by committing the mere act of remaining human, we are, in a way, still living,” he answered, folding his hands together before him. “I realized that this place shows us the people we need most when we most need them… I have seen the people I have loved, conversed with those I have cared most deeply for. I have felt my love for them. I have, in short, felt distinctly alive in a place meant to house the psychological remnants of the dead.”

I was speechless. As he often left me and many others. We found comfort and revelation in his profoundness. We found inner peace in his kindness. I found, moreover, that he was correct.

His eyes were yet another pair that pierced me. “You remain alive with those you love, Remus,” he said, his gaze never wavering, his smile never fading as he evaporated into a white mist and disappeared. For the rest of the day, I found myself in a sun-dappled forest, utterly alone except for my own voice inside my head - a voice which, I had been taught, was the voice of whom I most needed in the moment.  
  


* * *

  
  
I was exulting in existence and wallowing in it all the same. I despaired at my departure from the ‘real’ world and rejoiced in my reunion with my most treasured of connections. I did not see Dumbledore again for a long time, but he made the occasional visit into my ever-changing landscape. 

With Sirius, on the other hand, I travelled the world. We went everywhere together. We watched over Harry. We spent hours in perfectly comfortable silence - yet more in playful conversation or deep discussion. We saw everywhere we had ever wanted to see.

One magnificent night, we crawled out on the roof of an ancient stone manor and gazed up at the stars. Over twenty years ago on the Astronomy tower, I had done this to him, but tonight I did it again:

“Look,” I muttered into his ear, pointing up at the Canis Major constellation where a particularly bright star shone. “It’s Sirius.”

Without missing a single beat, he turned his head toward me.

“I’m right here,” he muttered back. “Always on your tail, aren’t I?”

I managed the wondrous feat of simultaneously rolling my eyes and leaning in to kiss him, tilting his head so that he looked up at the stars as I pushed his hair from his face. It felt, for all the world, as if I were back on earth again, breathing at his side.

**Author's Note:**

> Um. So. I don't think I've ever written anything quite this heartfelt, dramatic, or romantic, and I have certainly never added to the numerous works containing the stargazing cliche, but... here I am, feeling emotions and therefore poring emotions into one my most favorite of characters, our very own Remus Lupin, with the addition of Dumbledore (my mostest favoritest), and of course Sirius, the only one bringing any light-hearted moments to this fic. I sincerely hope you enjoyed.


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